“Wait—you came back before? Are you back for good now?”
Larry shook his head. “I can’t stay. I’ll explain, but first, you know, my family. Are they all right?”
“They moved away after you disappeared, Larry. To Acton—closer to your dad’s job. They couldn’t stand living in Glanbury, with everything reminding them of you. Cassie went to college, although I guess she’s graduated by now. Matthew must be in high school, I think. I don’t really keep in touch—it’s too painful for everyone. But I’m friends with your mom on Facebook—do you even know what Facebook is?”
Larry shook his head.
“Doesn’t matter. Anyway, your dad is mad at me for putting this crazy idea about the portal in your mom’s head. And, like you said, he probably thinks you should be the one going to Harvard. But, you know, I got kind of obsessed after you left. Well, even more obsessed, if that’s possible—trying to understand about the multiverse, about how we can travel from one universe to another. You know what it was like after we got back. This was all stuff that I knew was real, was true—it had actually happened to us—but on Earth, scientists would think I was crazy. I wanted to figure it out. There’s got to be an explanation—we just don’t know what it is. So I studied pretty hard. I’m still studying hard.”
“I’m sorry I put you in that position, Kevin. I’ve thought about that a lot. I got stuck on this other world—it’s called Terra—and couldn’t get home. It must have been awful for everyone.”
“Wasn’t great,” I agreed, which was the biggest understatement of my life. “Anyway, here’s Bartley’s.”
Larry ordered a burger and fries. He ate the burger like he’d never had one before. “I’m not really used to meat,” he explained. “Not beef, anyway. There’s nothing like this where I’ve been living.”
Meanwhile Emily texted me to ask if I was all right. I texted her back. Told her an old friend had shown up. I’d never mentioned Larry or our adventure to her. I didn’t want her thinking I was crazy too.
I couldn’t wait to hear Larry’s story. And I felt a little envious. My life is awesome—Emily is amazing, I’m going to a great college and studying what I want to study. But I think every day about our adventure. It had been awful in many ways—I got sick and almost died, for starters—but in my memory I didn’t bother with the awful parts and concentrated on the wonder of what we’d experienced. Living in a totally different world, learning how to do things on our own, helping to win a war—and most of all, seeing the different path that history could take.
“Okay, Larry,” I said when I couldn’t stand it anymore. “You’ve gotta tell me. What’s going on? Where have you been?”
“Fine,” he replied. “Here goes. I’ve been rehearsing this, because the story is pretty complicated. I’ll do my best.”
I tried not to interrupt. But finally he reached the heart of his story, and I had to learn more.
“Wait,” I said, “you learned how to build your own portal? How did you do that? Can anyone do that?”
“I don’t think so. Kevin, I seem to have a…talent. A power. Don’t know why, don’t know how. It took me years to develop it, but the preacher—Affron—helped. I was kind of obsessed—like you, maybe.”
And I suppose my envy grew then. My friend from middle school had a freaking superpower. But the envy was overwhelmed by my gratitude that he was alive. That he was here, talking to me. Like the old days.
“That’s amazing, Larry. I’ve got a ton of questions, but keep going. Tell me the rest of your story.”
He continued, talking about living in a place that sounded like heaven and returning to Terra to search for this girl he was in love with. He told me of his plan to rescue the Roman empire from the bad guys. And, finally, he told me why he was back here on Earth.
“That’s it?” I said. “That’s why you came back? You need a gun?”
Larry shrugged. “That’s it. Doesn’t need to be a good one. It just has to work.”
“Why do you need it?”
“To impress someone—a general who can help us. Remember the calculator we showed the guards at the refugee camp in Boston? It’s like that.”
I considered. “Well, I don’t know how to buy a gun. They make it hard in Massachusetts. You need a license, and I don’t have one.”
“Well, what about your cousin Brendan in Quincy? I remember you talking about him.”
“Oh geez, Brendan.” My cousin was kind of a creep. “He’s not just going to give us a gun, Larry. We’d have to buy it from him.”
“Of course,” Larry said. “I have money.” He reached into the pocket of his parka and threw a wad of hundred-dollar bills onto the table.
I stared at them. “How did you get that much money?” I asked.
“I got some gold from a guy on Elysium who collects stuff.” Larry took out some gold coins and added them to the pile of money on the table. “You can’t use gold to buy stuff on Earth, but you can sell it at a jewelry store, which is what I did with a couple of these coins. The coins are weird-looking because they’re from another world, but they’re still gold. Kind of freaked out the person at the jewelry store. I had to make up a story about where they were from.”
I picked up one of the coins and stared at it. It had indecipherable writing on it, and a likeness of a woman wearing a strange triangular hat—some kind of crown?
“Keep it,” Larry said. “The jewelry store gave me plenty of cash. It might help pay your tuition or something.”
I wasn’t going to sell the coin, but I put it in my pocket. “Thanks,” I said. “Let me see if I have Brendan’s number.” I looked through the contacts on my phone. His number was there, though I couldn’t remember the last time I had called him.
I tapped Call, and he answered after a couple of rings. “Hey, Brendan, it’s Kev,” I said. “I’ve got kind of an unusual request.”
It was a difficult conversation. Brendan and I aren’t close. He’s older than me, and pretty much a complete loser—dropped out of high school, in and out of trouble, always working on some get-rich-quick scheme that never works out. At family gatherings he likes to make fun of me for going to Harvard. What do you want to spend all that time studying physics for? he’d say. That’s never gonna make you any money. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know what physics is.
But he liked the idea that I was asking him for a favor. Smart college kid needs help! And he especially liked the idea of making a lot of money for no work.
“Okay,” I said to Larry when I’d finished negotiating with Brendan. “He’ll sell you a gun. It’s totally illegal, but he doesn’t care. Let’s go to Quincy.”
“Thanks, Kev. Sorry to be such a bother.”
I laughed. “Larry, don’t be silly. This is the best day of my life.”
We took an Uber. Larry, of course, had no idea what an Uber was. He’d missed so much. Not just Uber and Facebook but high school. Summer jobs. Learning how to drive. Taking the SATs. College visits. Senior prom. Normal life for a normal suburban kid. Did he regret it? Maybe he did. But you can’t have everything.
As much as I envied Larry, I’d had all those things.
Brendan lived on the second floor of a run-down two-family house in a rough neighborhood. I had never been there before. A mangy dog chained in the yard growled and lunged at us as we opened the rusted gate in the chain-link fence. We made our way up onto a porch that was lined with dead potted plants. Brendan’s doorbell was broken, so I rapped on the door. After a minute he let us in. He had greasy black hair, a scrawny beard, and bloodshot eyes. He was wearing sweat pants and a stained sleeveless t-shirt. His heavily muscled arms were covered with elaborate tattoos. He was very proud of his muscles and his tattoos.
“Hey, Brendan,” I said.
“What’s up, Kev.” He nodded to Larry.
We followed him upstairs into his living room, which was filled with empty beer cans and pizza boxes and dominated by a huge TV. The place stank of weed and sta
le beer.
“So, you want a gun,” Brendan said. “Gonna rob a bank to pay your tuition?”
“I told you—my friend needs it.”
Brendan turned to Larry. “You robbin’ a bank?” he asked.
Larry looked at him. “Don’t ask me what the gun is for,” he said. And then I noticed something about Larry that hadn’t quite struck me before—a presence, a hidden strength. My friend has a freaking superpower, I thought again.
Brendan seemed to sense it too. Something in his expression changed; the smug cockiness seemed to fade. And I thought: Oh my God, Brendan is afraid of him. What did he think Larry was going to do to him?
“Look,” Brendan said to Larry, “they can trace this gun to me. You really can’t be using it to do anything illegal. That was just a joke. Just for protection and stuff.”
Larry shrugged and took the wad of hundreds out of his pocket. “Don’t worry about it. I also need some ammunition.” He handed Brendan a bunch of the hundreds. “This should be enough, right?”
Brendan quickly checked the bills to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. “Yeah, sure,” he said, “that’ll be fine.”
“All right, let’s finish the deal. I’m in a hurry.”
“Okay, lemme just get the piece.”
Brendan hurried out of the room. “You terrify him,” I murmured to Larry.
“I have that effect on some people,” he replied. “It’s stupid.”
Except, I thought, it wasn’t.
Brendan returned a few minutes later with a gun and a small box of ammunition. “This is a Glock nine-millimeter,” he explained to Larry. “It’s really sweet. You know how to use it?”
“Show me.”
He gave Larry a quick demonstration. Then Larry put the gun and ammunition in the pocket of his parka and zipped it up. “Okay,” he said. “We’re done.”
“If you want to do any more business,” Brendan said, “I’m happy to—”
“That won’t be necessary,” Larry replied. “And never mention this to anyone. Ever.”
“Okay. Sure. Of course.”
Larry nodded. “Let’s go, Kevin,” he said, and he turned and walked back downstairs. “Jesus,” Brendan whispered to me at the top of the stairs. “That guy is something.” I ignored him and followed Larry. Outside, we made our way past the barking dog and back out onto the sidewalk.
“Thanks, Kev,” Larry said. “Brendan should go back to high school, I think.”
“No chance of that. So, what happens now?”
“Now I return to Elysium.”
“Where’s the portal?” I asked. “Where it was before—in the conservation land behind your house?”
He shrugged. “More or less. Here, take the rest of this money. I don’t need it.”
He shoved more hundreds at me. I thought about refusing them, but why would I do that? I put them into my pocket. “Thanks, Larry,” I said.
And here’s what I wanted to say: Take me with you, Larry. Let me see Elysium, let me see Terra. Let me experience these other worlds. Just for an hour, a day. Let me see their people, eat their food, smell their smells.
But I didn’t. Emily had sent two texts that I hadn’t responded to yet. I’m worried about you. Let me know you’re OK. I had missed a lab; I had a quiz to study for. I had a life here. I had no time for Elysium or Terra or the multiverse. So instead I said: “You’ll come back, right? After all this is done on Terra. Come back to your family and friends.”
Larry looked like he didn’t want to talk about it. “I’m not sure,” he said.
“You’ve got to. You know you do. This is your home.”
“It’s actually kind of hard to say where my home is now.”
I decided to ignore his indecision. “When you come back, can we test you? Like, put you in an fMRI or something?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a machine that looks at your brain. Maybe it’ll explain why you have this power.”
Larry laughed. “No, it won’t,” he replied. “Other people have done that sort of thing, on other worlds. Machines never show anything. Whatever is going on, it’s down at a level that machines can’t reach.”
“Okay, fine. Larry, never mind that. I want you back. I’ve missed you every day since you disappeared. We’ve both changed, but we’re both still the same, you know?”
“I know,” Larry murmured. “I know, Kevin.” We were both tearing up. We embraced, there on the cold Quincy street, and then he walked away.
I watched him turn the corner, and I thought for a moment about all the lives I would never live, and then I took out my phone to text Emily that I’d be back in Cambridge soon.
Forty-Nine
Larry
Everyone was at the café when Larry returned. He had told them where he was going and why. Now he took the gun out of his pocket and placed it on the table. People stared at it for a while in silence. He could tell that they didn’t like the look of it. He didn’t blame them.
“You were successful, then,” Hieron said finally.
“Yes,” he replied. He sat down, and Lucia brought him a plate of food. He wasn’t hungry after the meal he’d eaten on Earth, but he wasn’t going to tell her that.
“That is good, then.” Hieron didn’t sound thrilled.
“Was it painful, going back there again?” Amelia asked.
Of course it had been painful. And leaving had been almost unbearable. But he didn’t want to talk about it. “A bit,” was all that he said.
“Did you visit your family?”
He shook his head. “Just my friend Kevin. That was all I needed to do to get this gun. I did it, and I came back.”
Lucia squeezed his hand. She seemed to understand.
“Going home is never a good idea,” M’Nasi observed.
“If I went back to my home world I’d be burned at the stake,” Rigol said.
It was time to change the subject, Larry decided. “What’s been happening here?” he asked. “Have people made up their minds about helping me?”
“They’ll do it,” Lucia responded. “All of them. Including Amelia.”
Larry smiled and turned to Amelia. “You don’t need to help,” he said. “It’s not your battle.”
“It’s Affron’s battle,” she replied, “and so it’s mine as well.”
“When do we start?” Affron asked.
Larry considered. “Do you have any plans for tomorrow?”
Samos
Samos couldn’t stay away from the Via in the garden. He would sit and stare for hours at the spot where it stood. Did he detect a shimmering at times? The faintest blue light? Or was that just his imagination? Occasionally he would approach it and diffidently place his hand inside, watching in wonder as his hand disappeared. His hand was still there, of course, but where? And what would happen if he strode into Via and out the other side? Where would he end up? Could he return?
The others—Lamathe, Theodosius, Karellia, even Palta—were less interested in it, he supposed, because they had actually used Via. But Samos had never had the chance. He’d been too young; he was just in the early stages of his training in Urbis when the Gallians arrived. So Via had just been a luminous, beckoning shape in the temple—something to gaze at in awe, but not to use. Someday, always someday.
And then the someday turned to never. Oh, at first Lamathe and the others thought: surely it would all change when the Gallians’ gants lose their power and the people rise up against them…But their gants had failed, and the people had risen, yet still the Gallians clung to power.
And now?
Samos had been angry and despairing for a long time. When Palta’s friend arrived, Samos had been happy for her, but who could really believe that this fellow had built his own Via? And then he sat on the ground in the garden and built one before their eyes, in some baffling way that Samos could not hope to understand. And when finally it existed, when finally Larry Barnes walked into it and disappeared, Samos had felt a st
range, unexpected, unfamiliar emotion: hope.
And then the agonizing wait began. And every day that passed, Samos felt his hope slipping away. Soon, he thought, the anger and despair would return, only redoubled to make up for the time he had allowed himself to think that perhaps something good would finally happen.
But not yet, not just yet. Still he could sit in the garden and stare at the nothingness, and ponder the incomprehensible mystery that this nothingness represented, and imagine Larry Barnes walking out of that nothingness to save Terra.
Then, finally, it happened. As Samos watched, Larry Barnes walked out of his Via and into the garden.
And Larry Barnes was not alone.
Lamathe
Lamathe could not stop weeping. Usually it was Theodosius who wept, and probably he was doing so as well; Lamathe didn’t notice, didn’t really care. He only cared that Hieron was here, alive, standing in front of them. Lamathe could now see the end of all their struggles, all their doubts and fears. Hieron would be their guide, their savior. With him, anything was possible.
Affron was here, too, and his presence by itself would have been enough to buoy their spirits. He brought with him a woman named Amelia who also had the power to create her own Via. They were all here to help them defeat the Gallians.
It was too much to take in.
Everyone went to the courtyard and sat. Uduon and Cetonia brought them food and beer. Lamathe regained control of his emotions soon enough; the other priests depended on him, and he couldn’t let them down. Larry presented his plan, and everyone discussed it. Disagreements were resolved; refinements were proposed. It seemed that no one had told Larry about Hibernia. They would need the priests who lived there, would they not? The plan would take time, they all agreed; it would entail risk. But Lamathe thought: how could it fail? Here was Hieron; here was Affron; here was a weapon from another world.
Larry showed them the weapon, let them hold it. Lamathe had seen such things on other worlds, of course—dangerous worlds that viators often avoided. It was far less lethal than a gant, but in some ways it would be better for their purposes.
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